


Things Precious

by reallysmallgiantrobot



Category: GoGo Sentai Boukenger | Rumbling Squadron Boukenger, Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider Black, Kamen Rider Kuuga, Super Sentai Series
Genre: Body Horror, Cults, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 19:26:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 28
Words: 17,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3948778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reallysmallgiantrobot/pseuds/reallysmallgiantrobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While investigating a Precious sighting, Satoru Akashi encounters a strange cult and a man who is not what he seems.</p>
<p>(Content Advisory: Cults and body horror.  "Graphic Violence" is not exactly accurate as a descriptor but I thought I'd put it in because there's some stuff that I think could hit a lot of the same buttons as does graphic violence.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_The house deep in the forest was a house no longer.  They’d burned it down as the hooded man had said they must.  Now they lived in the charred remains of their cremated lives, inhaling soot and subsisting on charred slabs of something which they were sure had once been meat._

_It was painful to think of what the meat had been, but the hooded man had said that they must keep it in mind, that they must learn to love the knowledge and weight of what they had done to please the thing behind the hooded man that they could not see but could feel deep inside themselves._

_Sometimes one or another of them would try to tell themselves that it was the thing behind the hooded man that made them do these things; these things that made their numbers dwindle._

_They knew it was a lie, but it was what they told themselves._


	2. Chapter 01

Small, sleepy towns weren’t Akashi’s favourite places to go.  Even the ones that had touristed up to survive just lacked… well, anything.  Anything real, at least.  He got a good feel for the things which mattered to people and which didn’t, which bar had been around longest, which restaurant with its elderly manager was the best to eat at—there might be a wait of as many as twenty minutes to get a table—and if you were _very_ lucky, you got a rundown on the local history by the historical society; usually very sanitized but people who loved their community didn’t tend to want to scream “this is where some labor activists were maimed”.

Akashi had to admit that in that respect, this town was different and a little better than most because of it.  For whatever reason, the tour of rural Germany he’d joined (as cover for his search for a Precious rumoured to be in the area) had taken them through a town which was fascinated by its own history as the site of witch trials in the 1500s.  It was something that jumped out at him, not only because of its strangeness but also because it was a better sign than most that he was on the right track.

Of course, that was only half of what made the trip as fascinating as he found it.

The other half was that somehow, in a tour group made largely of gossipy Brits and a couple Americans looking to reconnect with their roots, there was someone else from Japan.  Bit of a dreamer, sure, but his English and German were more fluid than Akashi’s and was happy to listen when Akashi complained about the seats on the bus or joked about the quality of the food you got in between stops on the tour.  Of course, what was notable about the man wasn’t that he was someone else from Japan who was also taking an interest in the goings-on in some tiny town nobody’d ever heard of in southern Saxony; what was interesting was that just being near him set his Accellular’s hazard level detector into a panic.

The man, who’d introduced himself as Godai Yuusuke, should have been acting strange—having a Precious (or some other similarly-powerful artifact) on your person tended to make people want to try to do stupid things or caused unlikely things to happen all around them—but in every respect, he was almost aggressively normal.  Oh, sure, he looked as if he’d been living out of his backpack for the past few months, what with his scraggly beard and long hair, but that was normal enough.

But SGS didn’t send him to rural Germany on the off-chance that a Japanese hippie would be passing through.  More than once, Akashi thought about calling in the rest of the Boukenger squad, asking them to go look for—well, for whatever it was he was meant to find while he investigated Godai; but they were stretched thin as it was.  Between attempted invasions and the odd interdimensional war, securing even the smallest Precious took precedence unless something big was happening.

And somehow Godai was handling his possession of an apocalyptic Precious without a lot of ill effects so Akashi just dropped a tracker into the man’s bag.  It was skeevy to do so but it was also irresponsible to let someone walk around with something that powerful; Godai seemed like a good person but if a not-so-good person got hold of it, Akashi shuddered to think what could result.

Godai just kept writing things down in a battered-looking notebook (neither it nor the man’s pencil were the Precious) and, curiously, kept addressing each entry to someone called “Ichijou”, a name which didn’t sound sinister enough to be his handler in some evil organization.  Godai’s camera wasn’t the Precious, either; nor was his five-year-old VodaPhone, his slightly newer smartphone that was never turned on (probably because this far out, even texting would cost a fortune) his boxer shorts, or his travel toothbrush.  Akashi knew this to be the case because while Godai was sleeping, he’d snuck into the man’s small room at the rustic hotel run by a harried-looking middle-aged couple and was sifting through the man’s bags.  If the man wasn’t _using_ the Precious, he might not know he had it and therefore might not notice when he _didn’t_ have it any more.

“What are you doing?”

Akashi grimaced at the sound of Godai’s voice.  Somehow, the man sounded completely calm.  That was almost worse.  It was a difficult question to answer, really, because the truth was far more bizarre than any lie he could tell and while he didn’t mind being mistaken for a thief or a pervert, it honestly seemed like a lot more work what with all the talking he’d have to do with the local authorities.  Akashi looked up at Godai and something in the other man’s expression combined with Akashi’s own inability to come up with a lie that would make anything approaching sense made him level with the man.

Akashi explained about the Precious he’d caught on his Accellular and about SGS’ mission to secure the Precious lest they fall into the hands of the unwitting or the malign and cause some kind of chaos.

And Godai?  Godai just asked Akashi to turn around for a second so he could put on some clothes.  This was the sort of conversation you had over a cup of coffee.


	3. Interlude - The House

_The hooded man’s invisible spotlights—the lights which came from seemingly nowhere and lit up the ruins of what had once been a backyard—came on again and they all stood in a circle.  It was random, it was always random.  The hooded man would flip a coin or make them draw lots or spin a bottle in the blackened ash that was once a child’s favourite toy or a stretch of plastic that had once been an inflatable wading pool.  Once the pair had been decided, they would…_

_They would do what they were doing now._

_The two of them knew each other.  They’d been close and if either of them felt they had a choice, they would do anything but this._

_The woman, a mother of four and grandmother of six, let out a choked sound as she brought the claw-hammer down on a man who had seconds before been both trying to kill her and her son.  The others chanted the word the hooded man bade them chant and scrambled over the dead man’s body to tear away his clothes to start the next fire.  There was to be another feast, a celebration for the thing which lurked, invisible, behind the hooded man who commanded them._

_The thing was growing and in celebration of this, when the fire was bright enough, mother threw son onto it.  She wept openly but sang the praises of the hooded man all the same between each heaving sob._


	4. Chapter 02

 

There were conversations you needed to be drunk for.  But somehow Akashi and Godai had got through the one about SGS’s mission sober and without Godai freaking out, which was good.

The one which followed was one which Akashi desperately wished he’d just invited the man out to the one place that looked even remotely like a bar open late where all the sad old locals congregated but, well, it wasn’t the sort of conversation that really went well with people crying into their beer or with the sound of Americans in the background having long conversations about whether or not you could get this or that beer back home.

“It’s called the Amadam,” explained Godai once he’d put on a pair of boxers and a t-shirt (it had a symbol on it, one which was frustratingly familiar to the man), “It’s an ancient… I dunno.  _Thing_ ,” the word was said with the kind of awe, fear and disdain he had for particularly troublesome Precious.  Godai made a dismissive gesture, apparently unconcerned about the thing’s nature, “The Linto—do you know about them?”

“The theorized pre-historic society they found out about in Nagano?” Akashi ventured, trying to remember the name of the woman who wrote all those papers after the winter of 2000.  Sakorako and Soren?  No, that wasn’t right.  Sakurako and someone European, anyway.

 “Anyway,” Godai continued, “they found the Amadam stone but saw what it did to people so they made the Arcle to hold it in…”  He laughed then and patted his stomach, just above his waist, “I was younger and stupid so now it lives inside me.”

Well, that did explain things, didn’t it?  Complicated them, too.  “I don’t suppose you’d let me take it back to SGS?”

Godai laughed again—though this time Akashi noticed that the smile was thinner and the laugh sadder—and replied, “If I thought I could do that without dying, I’d do it in a heartbeat.  But it wired itself into my nerves, so.”

Akashi was considering offering the man a job as SGS; anyone who could be this casual about having something so dangerous inside themselves was the kind of man they could use.  Maybe set him up in the new Archives?  Something far away from the action—it was hard not to feel as if the man wasn’t built for the running, fighting and occasional explosion.

“So have you been following me or something?”

It was Akashi’s turn to laugh as he offered a shrug and a shake of his head, “Pure accident, actually.  But once the Hazard Detector found your ‘Amadam’, I thought I’d pack it up and send it to the nearest SGS vault I could find.  And now that that’s not happening, I can filter it out and see if the _actual_ Precious I’m looking for is in _this_ town or the next one or…”  Akashi let out a sigh and

Godai put on a big smile and gave him a thumbs-up.  “You’ll find it.  I know you will.”

“I know.”  Akashi smiled a bit and gestured back to the door to Godai’s hotel room, “I’m just gonna get some sleep now, though.  And it’s a lot easier to do if I don’t have to do so much climbing in windows.”


	5. Interlude - The Church

 

_The old Lutheran priest fought with himself._

_The hooded man had spoken the truth and it was terrible.  Worse, he had introduced him to the thing which stood behind it.  It had revealed its nature to him and told him that soon he must join the others at the house in the woods that was no longer a house, that he must minister to their needs and remind them what it was that made the brotherhood of Man commit fratricide so willingly.  He must go to them and use the fine wooden crucifix, the one this church had curated since the 1700s, and throw it on the fire._

_He had seen into the thing behind the hooded man and it had seen into him and told him his life, told him about his long years in service to his community and about the slow decline that was afflicting his congregation and his small town.  It told him his service was admirable but for the fact that it was affected by the same heat-death which came to all natural things._

_It told him of the future he was working toward and though he fought the thought, the thing told him of the future it would bring about, one a thousand times more horrible._

_He fought with himself as he pulled the aged crucifix—smelling of lacquer lovingly applied by old Mr. Müller and well-tended wood—down off the wall.  He felt tears welling in his eyes as the memory of the hooded man’s voice carefully and sympathetically explained why this all had to happen._

_The old priest knew he should have more faith, that he should have the words to rebuke the hooded man and the thing he heralded.  But he was old—hardy, yes, but still old—and the blazing fire of his youthful faith had cooled to a comfortable crackling around which the men and women of his community would gather to laugh and share and commune with one another and the divine.  He gave comfort, succor and support not only because he had received the call to service but because they were things he could give and because people always needed them._

_The sympathy of an old priest would not save them and if the thing behind the hooded man was a glimpse at what truly lay beyond human sight, he was not sure anything else would, either._

_It offered its terms and, hating himself all the while, the old priest accepted them and loaded the crucifix into the back of his old hatchback sedan, to make his way to the new Golgotha the thing had made._


	6. Chapter 03

 

The tour guide was explaining something about the witch trials the town had been involved in.  Predictably, it was all phrased as if the trials themselves were natural events that just happened, like earthquakes or bad weather.  There was a school of history (or at least of the tourism business) that said you should talk about things that way; people reconnecting with their roots or out on a bit of touring didn’t like to think too hard about the horror that was common if you looked deep enough into any sort of settlement that had been around a sufficient length of time.  And it wasn’t as if most of the places Akashi’d lived hadn’t had their fair share of horror at one point or another, either.

It was hard not to notice that Godai had wandered away from the tour group a bit.  Not far enough that the tour guide would notice and check on him but certainly far enough that he could screen the tour guide out.  Maybe he had a weak stomach for these sorts of things.  But it was just as well, the town square where they were congregating didn’t have the feel of anywhere you’d hide a Precious: the ground didn’t have any of the signs of hiding anything (certainly not anything anyone wanted), no trap doors, no secret sets of levers disguised as bricks, no massive stone calendars pretending to be modern art, no anything.  Which was just as well because there were large forests out the outskirts of the tiny town, forests filled with all manner of things and he just knew that once he got out of this stifling excuse for a town square, there was new forest to trek through, new Precious to find and new adventure to be had.

But first.

His hand shot up and the tour guide paused.  “Excuse me,” he said with his best English as he gestured to Godai, who looked a bit surprised.  “I think my friend here’s feeling a little ill, I’m gonna get him something to drink.  Where are we going next?”

The guide thought for a moment before replying, “We’ll be meeting the… well, the closest word for it is the chamber of commerce in about an hour, so don’t be too long!”

“We won’t!” he lied with a smile as he pulled Godai away from the crowd.

Godai laughed a little and let himself be dragged away as the guide resumed discussing the various atrocities which had “been committed” in the area.  There was something a bit untoward about the details she brought to the descriptions of what the _Malleus Maleficarum_ ordained about what you should do with witches but he payed it no mind; a little scandal got people excited, especially when it came to magic.  Especially when it was at the intersection of magic and women dying.  But that was people for you.  He hated thinking that cynically but there were reasons he kept his team back at SGS so lean: he needed to make sure he was working with people whose hearts were in places he could trust. 

He didn’t trust people who “oooo”-ed and “aaaah”-ed over every atrocity.

One more reason to pull Godai aside beyond his need to get out of town; Godai didn’t seem much for atrocities.

Akashi guided Godai to a corner store filled with overpriced soft drinks and assorted hideous gewgaws for the tourists; t-shirts with silhouettes of witches, little witch hats, reams and reams of dust-covered “spell books” to sell to any teenagers who came along with the tour groups; teenagers who clearly never arrived.

Akashi handed a few Euro to the middle-aged woman behind the counter and passed the overpriced bottle of carbonated water to Godai, who was just laughing a little.

“That desperate to get away?” asked the man as he unscrewed the cap.

“Ha!” Akashi replied with a grin, “This is me doing you a favor.”

“Favour?  How do you figure?”  Godai’s look was curious now under the smile.  Curious and, maybe, a bit relieved.

“I don’t know why you’re on this tour if you don’t like hearing about things like that,” replied Akashi as he stepped back out onto the street, “You’re playing at being okay with it but all that talk of these witch trials has got you on edge.  I’d offer to buy you a drink to calm your nerves but the group could still see us so we’re going to lie and say that you’re drinking the fizzy water to calm your stomach.”

The other man laughed a little, a bit impressed, and obligingly sagged his shoulders and let his face droop as he sipped at the water, looking for all the world like someone trying to calm his stomach.  “I… I just want to understand it, is all,” Godai said after a couple sips from the plastic bottle.  “There’s all this _hurt_ everywhere, as long as there have been people.  All over the world, all through history.  People fighting wars over the stupidest… no.” Godai stopped himself for a moment, looking for the words, “there’s people all over the world doing all this terrible stuff—hurting themselves and everyone around them—when there’s no real purpose to it.  They say it’s for God or family or race or a thousand other things and…” 

Akashi watched the man and suddenly the fatigue in his features didn’t seem so faked.  There was a bone-deep weariness that made Akashi realize that, no, he probably wouldn’t be offering the man a job at SGS; he was right for it but would probably burn out in a matter of months.  Akashi’d seen it happen more than once.

“…and I just want to understand it.  People do such terrible things and,” here Akashi couldn’t help noticing the man looking down at his hands which were clenching and unclenching into fists before he laid one hand on top of the other as if to hide the fist from view, “and I want to know _why_.”

That last word was almost sobbed even if Godai’s eyes remained dry.  Akashi had to admit that he was impressed at the man’s self-control.

Impressed and a little afraid.

“If you ever figure that one out, they’ll give you a Nobel Prize or make you a saint or something,” joked Akashi.

Godai blushed a little and shrugged, seeming to force himself back into a more jovial mood.  “Well, it’ll keep me busy, anyway,” Godai mumbled in a way that screamed pain at Akashi.

But Akashi could only shrug before looking sidelong at the corner around which the tour group was disappearing.  “And speaking of keeping busy…” he mumbled before turning back to Godai, “Thanks for letting me use you for a distraction.  Think I could ask you to do it a second time?”

“Probably,” replied the man with an easy smile that somehow made Akashi forget how tired he sounded a few moments ago, “What’s going on?”

He’d have to look into this guy later.

“Nothing much.  Just looking into that Precious I came here to find and after a look around this town?  I don’t think I’m going to find it on the tour group.  Think you could tell ‘em I caught some of whatever you had or something like that?”

Godai laughed under his breath and took another sip from his bottle.  “Something like that.  Best of luck, okay?  Just…”

“Hm?”

“Let me get a look at it before you head back to… wherever it is.  I’d really love to see a magical artifact that wasn’t, y’know,” he tapped his stomach a couple times.

Akashi laughed and reached into his jacket, producing his SGS business card and handing it to Godai, “Next time you’re in Kanagawa, stop by this address.  We’ll give you the guided tour.  And maybe see if there’s any way to get that thing out of you.”

Godai laughed a little and tucked the card into his pocket, before pulling one out of his own pocket, looking down at it before producing a pen, scratching out something on its face, writing in something else and passing it to Akashi with a grin. 

Akashi looked down at it and chuckled.  There was a little cartoon of a man giving a thumbs-up and it read “Godai Yuusuke: Adventurer, the man with—“ here, the number 3000 had been crossed out with a different number written in its place, “—3019 skills”.  He tucked the card into his jacket and smiled. 

“When I’m done here, I’ll have to ask what some of those skills are,” joked Akashi.

Godai just grinned and gave the man a thumbs-up.

Akashi grinned and snapped his fingers, “Attack!”

Godai chuckled and raised an eyebrow, about to ask what that was about.

But Akashi was already gone.


	7. Interlude - Dreaming

 

_They were allowed sleep._

_They were thankful for it, though they were too tired to say it.  Their oblations took their toll but the hooded man and his master did not only promise that it was worth it: it proved it._

_The hooded man pulled back his hood._

_The hooded man pulled back his face._

_The thing behind the hooded man showed itself through the hole left by the hooded man and in seeing it, they saw through its eyes.  For a moment, they were connected to its massive consciousness and felt its hands—far away yet closer than any of them dared to believe—hard at work shaping their future._

_Its voice was like metal scraping against metal and it told them to continue, showed them that their sacrifices were already bearing fruit; that their loved ones had not died in vain.  They had never touched a god which fulfilled its promises as this thing did._

_When they dreamed, they dreamed of its metal-on-metal singing, of its hands at work, of the hooded man behind his pulpit of wreckage feeding them ash and their stomachs changing and their bodies changing and their faces changing and their hearts and minds staying the same to revel in the horror of what was to come, of what had come, of what was needed._

_The thing had made their home a ruin, made their cars a ruin, made their lives a ruin._

_But what was the death of the old—for they were all of them old, no matter how young they’d felt before the hooded man arrived—compared to the world that was coming?  The world the thing had promised them?_

_The thing was honest, it showed them the arc of history and showed the place their home had had in that arc.  There was fire and blades and torture.  And it was always coming back.  Great men with great books and great power had stolen from them the world which had been promised to them and there was no fighting it._

_They were given an alternative and it fed them ash and poison and made them breathe smoke and batter their loved ones with all the force they would have saved for their greatest enemies._

_Because the world was coming.  It was always coming, they saw that now._

_And in dreams, the metal-on-metal presence showed them that there was hope in the coming world, provided they were able to give the old one the sendoff it demanded._


	8. Chapter 04

 

The great thing about small towns was that it wasn’t long before you weren’t in them anymore.  A few kilometers in the right direction and you were in proper territory for someone like Akashi: grass that hadn’t seen a blade in years, freegrowing trees, hills and massive stones left behind when the glaciers rolled through.  A whole world far out of sight and it was just a question of finding the right place to start.

He was spoiled for choice.  Maybe it was in his genes, maybe his father had actually managed to teach him something, but standing waist-deep in damp grass on an overcast morning thousands of miles from home base with a vague sense that there was something of incalculable value nearby made him feel like “The Immortal Fang”.  There was something in the air that made him

No, there really _was_ something in the air.  Something just this side of foul.

It was coming from the steep hill, the one covered thick with the chilly wetness of a pine forest.

It was glorious.  He knew how to keep his body in a relatively calm humor but even though he was holding his pulse at a solid sixty beats per minute, he could feel excitement creeping through him.  The thrill of the novel.  Oh, certainly, it hadn’t yet turned into ancient temples or booby traps, but when it came to Precious, it so often did.

The scent was getting stronger the deeper he went into the forest and the higher he climbed and while he didn’t have any distinct objects to run his hazard level detector over, it was hard not to feel that he was getting closer to _something_.  It was probably the scene of a crime but the smell wasn’t quite right for something as simple as a murder, which meant…

Well, it was hard to say what that meant.

That was what made it worth doing.

Akashi used a fat root sticking out from the undergrowth to pull himself a little higher up, senses open, nose filled with the scent of pines and eyes scanning everything within their reach for signs of something strange.  There were no sounds but the shuffle of his feet through the undergrowth, the wind through the trees and the fabric of his coat brushing against itself as he moved.  It was all frustratingly normal but he was getting closer to the source of the smell, which only gained new nuance the further in he moved: metal shavings, oil, burning wood, aggressively unpleasant burning meat.  Everything but the smell was just this side of normal.

He loved it.

He came to a road on the hill.  He had to admit disappointment that he was following a trail that led to a road that was already made; on the other hand, things were starting to take shape.  A road meant there was a destination, which meant that there was something someone wanted to go to.  The road was old but well-used, made of tightly packed dirt and clay and cared for to the point that it didn’t have the telltale strip of grass down the middle.  Not quite large enough for a lorry but for most commercially available passenger vehicles?  No problem at all.  All signs pointed to a private road, probably belonging to some upper-middle-class sorts who didn’t want to mix with the _hoi poloi_ down in town.

For some people, you just couldn’t get far enough away from the lower classes, huh?  Oh, but Sakura and Souta had told him some stories.  For not the first time, he wished he could swap places with one of the others, but odds were good they weren’t finding ancient temples filled with booby traps but the same sorts of places.  It was frustrating how mundane adventuring could sometimes become.

There were tire tracks leading up the hill and while there was a lot of overlap, he didn’t notice any traces of the same tracks twice so everything recent was all going one way.  Either the house or houses at the end of the drive were abandoned or crowded.  Interesting.

Akashi kept off the road, as much out of a desire for stealth as for the pleasure of moving through rough terrain, as he moved toward the source of the scent.

It was nearly overpowering now, blocking out the pleasant wetness of a coniferous forest and replacing it with an almost mechanical stink.  He had an urge to gag but he was not inclined to let something as small as the human body’s overt rejection of certain smells get in his way or risk blowing his cover.

The road curved up and away from him, around a bend into the trees, heading who-knew-where but the smell kept coming from straight ahead and he followed his nose, glad that he had brought a handkerchief with which to cover this nose as he followed it.

The ground underneath him just seemed to stop, a sheer drop downward where a massive, squared chunk had been carved out of the hill.  Peeking over it, he saw the source of the stink: in the crater, there was something growing.

But it shouldn’t have been.

It resembled nothing so much as a corpse flower with sickly, sticky-looking tendrils attached to it, glowing with power that was coming from… from inside the hill, apparently; they just led into the earth from which this sheer crevice had been cut.  Down below, he saw beings, things which must once have been human, hovering over what looked for all the world like seedpods, attached by more of those glowing, sticky cords, to the base of the corpse flower.

He pulled out his binoculars to see what it was they were fretting over and saw that the creatures—one which resembled a rat with matted fur cruelly forced to walk upright with human proportions, another like some cruel parody of an ant, similarly stretched into human shape with extra vestigial limbs twitching against its chest.  They appeared to be in pain; it nearly radiated off of them.  The creatures fussed and fretted over a pod and when they moved, he saw that inside it was a child into which the tendrils seemed to be feeding whatever malign energies the corpse-flower was drawing from the hillside.

His Accelular was letting out a faint “ping ping ping” sound.  He pulled it from its pouch and brought it to bear on the flower. 

It made a kind of sense: corpse flowers were rare to begin with and one that a pile of half-human _things_ were fussing over?  Definitely something that needed to be put in the biggest, most heavily-guarded greenhouse they could find, away from whatever on Earth its current owners were doing to it.

And if someone was feeding children to it, something needed to be done and quick.  Call in the team, hold them off until they could arrive.  Standard procedure.  Of course, that was standard procedure in Japan, but he was a long way from there now, which complicated matters.

Akashi was about to pull back and work on a proper plan of action when a third figure, a hooded man, looked up at him, looked up at him and _saw_ him from that far away.  Akashi saw only an aggressively average face with massive, empty eyes before he felt the presence behind or inside the man notice him.  Wasn’t the first time he’d felt that sick, smothering sensation you got when something that wasn’t supposed to exist turned the physical force of its attention on you; but it wasn’t one you ever got used to.  At least he hoped you didn’t.

Before he even realized he was doing it, he felt the friction as he drew the wheel of his Accelular down his sleeve.

“Start up!” he shouted, already feeling his clothes changing into the strength-enhancing fibers of SGS’ Boukenger suits.  As the familiar red helmet manifested itself around his head, he felt every nerve and instinct in him sparking to life, the faint beginnings of a plan forming in his head:  get to the flower, disconnect the pods, fight the monsters, hope the GoGo Dump Truck could make it to rural Germany as fast as it made it anywhere around Japan, get the flower back to SGS’ vault.

He’d had worse plans.

There was also the complication where he didn’t know what the creatures were up to or what the massive presence behind the hooded figure wanted.

But like hell if the Firey Adventurer, Bouken Red, was going to let the any of this stand.


	9. Interlude - The Child

 

_The thing had once been a child._

_Not a particularly beautiful or clever child, not a child with any particularly large amount of promise nor a noteworthy lack thereof, but it had been a child.  Someone’s child.  Someone had loved it and it had loved that someone and the child had dreamed of a future, of a beautiful time when the child would be free and able to explore and learn and love and not have to go to bed when it was told._

_The someone who had loved the child was dead.  The child was not.  Their child was not the child it had been.  Now it was something else, something stronger and, in its way, older than any child should be.  A metal-on-metal voice whispered as the child-that-was-not-a-child slumbered, as it was transformed._

_Outside, the metal-on-metal voice told the child-that-wasn’t that there was such strife in the world outside.  Strife that the parents knew and had taken pains to protect it from but from which they could not protect the child forever.  There were thousands of things which were coming but none so bleak and frightful as the spectre of an empty future for the child in a town that was slowly drying up and dying or in a city where there was no money and no hope for those who weren’t already rich.  The thing’s metal-on-metal voice was almost soothing as it assured the child-that-wasn’t that it need not fear this pale future any longer, that the child was to be cared for, protected, loved forever._

_The thing with its scraping metal voice promised the not-a-child an escape from the world its parents had ruined, a world free from the privations its parents’ short-sightedness had created and were even now fighting hard to secure an escape for the not-a-child._

_The thing which had once been a child stirred in its slumber and was comforted._


	10. Chapter 05

 

The blunt end of the javelin with which his suit was equipped slammed into the side of the rat-creature’s head.  Akashi was fairly sure he saw the rat-creature’s eyes roll back in its head a little.  No counting it out until he was sure.  He kept his forward motion going as best he could, stepping into the next attack which brought the bladed end of the javelin around to slash at the ant-creature’s face.

It had good reflexes.  Dodged right out of the way and tried to grab the javelin with the underdeveloped arms on its chest; it wasn’t used to using them, though.  Akashi’d dealt with enough mutants and monsters to know what it looked like when something was new to its body and when it was in pain.  This poor creature was both.  But it was also up to something.  He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but he was in the habit of taking things one step at a time.  Think too far ahead and you got distracted worrying about what was next, what was around the next turn, what happened after the spike pit or the collapsing floor or the poison gas.

You got out of it then you dealt with what happened next.  If you climbed out of a frying pan and into the fire, you stopped worry about the pan and got to work putting the fire out.

The ant-creature groaned as it caught the base of the javelin’s blade but they weren’t strong or coordinated enough (yet) to hold it.  Of course, they didn’t have to; the moment Akashi spent pulling the weapon free was a moment the ant-creature used to take a swing at him. 

Thankfully, the ant-creature was not the only one who knew how to dodge.

Good thing, too.  He could hear the creature’s muscles creaking like rusty hydraulics even as the blow missed him.  He’d been on the business end of too many things that sounded like that to want to risk it again.

Yanking the javelin free, Akashi rolled back into a crouch before springing forward at the ant-creature, javelin pulled back to strike when the hooded man intervened and caught the blade in his hand and turned his empty eyes to Akashi himself. 

The man’s gaze—no, the gaze of the thing inside him—made Akashi’s whole body hurt and snatched his breath away, like landing on your back from two stories up.  If not for his suit keeping him together, he wasn’t sure he’d still be alive now.  But since he was alive, he turned his face to try and meet the hooded man’s immense gaze.

“Wh-“ he began before he felt the thing inside the hooded man reach into him, cutting the thought short.

**You will leave.**

Akashi knew in his gut that this was not a request or a demand, this was a fact.  The thing inside the man seemed to have described an immutable law of the universe.  He would leave.  He would just not be in this place anymore.  It was a fact that he accepted the way he accepted gravity and he was about to nod his assent

before he remembered that this was no longer a mission to collect a Precious, but a mission to save a child from whatever it was these people were doing to it.  He was about to snarl a reply when the voice rang in his head again, louder this time, like being inside a churchbell.

**You will send your vehicle home and you will leave.**

Akashi’s hand was on his Accelular before he could do anything about it.  The way he had to reach up and put his hand between his thumb and the “cancel” button frightened him.  His body was not his own, he couldn’t.

**You will send your vehicle home, you will transform back and you will leave, Akashi Satoru.**

Akashi could hear his blood rushing in his ears like the yawning of some great, unknown chasm, like the feeling of pressure when Sakura took him down in her submarine and they’d sit there in the dark, listening to the immense pressure of the ocean threatening to crush even the super-alloys which made up the Boukenger’s vehicles.  The thing inside the hooded man spoke and when it intoned his name, it sounded like his father and he felt its attention saturating his soul and he wanted to fight back, he wanted to strangle it, to feel the heat of it as it exploded but

But it was gone.  So was the plant.  So was the hilly terrain.  He was back in his hotel and packing his things and Godai was watching him from the open doorway with an expression of worry.

Akashi forced his hands to stop what they were doing as he focused his attention on Godai’s voice.

“Mr. Akashi, can you hear me?”

Akashi shook his head to try and clear it, checking his shoulder pouch for his Accelular—it was there, thank goodness—and took a breath.

“I hear you,” he replied finally as he felt his will reasserting itself over his body, “And I need your help.”


	11. Interlude - The New World

 

_They were all shocked when the two victors returned with the hooded man.  They had met something, some interfering thing, an interloper.  An interloper who seemed intent on inflicting the future the hooded man had warned them about upon the children who even now rested inside their warm, external wombs._

_A buzz of activity went through the handful of tired, battered remainders of the hooded man’s praise._

_They had grown in number, absorbing more and more of the town’s population with the hooded man ordering a bare skeleton back out into the world to act as the city’s breath to avoid any outsiders noticing anything was wrong.  More and more towns like theirs were running low on citizens.  The young fled to the cities and once there could not leave, clinging to humiliating jobs and unable to afford the schooling which would gain them access to better prospects; prospects which seemed to be shrinking by the hour, anyway._

_And all the while those cities which had swallowed and tormented their children grew, either absorbing smaller areas into their great, empty bulks or sucking them dry, leaving the elderly to die alone and unloved as they watched their children suffer._

_They had been found out and were none of them sure what to do._

_But the hooded man spoke of a communion that night, one which would strengthen and give hope to their sleeping children, one which would prepare them for the world which was coming, the world they must create.  The world their ancestors tried to burn out.  The world modernity tried to hide.  The world which was the true inheritor of humanity._

_Some of the survivors scrambled in the ashes of the now for burnt remains they could bring to their mouths while others shoved their bloodied faces against the ground to lick up the soot in an ecstasy of death and transformation as the thing behind the hooded man sang in its metal-on-metal voice a hymn none of them had heard before._

_They would resume building their new world._

_Once it had been secured from the unclean._


	12. Chapter 06

 

“Evacuate?” Godai repeated, incredulous, “Why?”

“Because, there’s something _here_.  Something coming.  Something...” Akashi searched for the words and hated himself for settling on something so bizarrely banal as, “… _evil_.”  He wanted to elaborate.  Indeed, he was about to but something in Godai’s face twisted.

There was an explosion of heat from somewhere in the hallway where Godai stood and Akashi was sure the things from the corpse flower had followed him and set the building on fire but when he moved to pull Godai away from the doorway, he felt another wave of heat hit him.

His Accelular was almost screaming in its pouch and Akashi didn’t need to turn it on Godai to realize that somehow he’d said something that set the Precious inside the man into motion.

Akashi was holding his hand out to the man, hoping his seemed calming and not like a threat, “Godai, what’s—“ he began before the heat abruptly stopped.

Godai slumped against the wall and slid down it, covering his face with his hands.  Was—was he crying?

Akashi dropped to one knee beside the man, “Look, you need to get to the tour group, to anyone and everyone you can.  There’s something coming and I can’t—“

“Why did you have to tell _me_?” whispered Godai.  Something in the man’s voice made Akashi’s blood run colder than even the gaze of the… the _thing_ in the hooded man.  There was something coldly furious and desperate and afraid in the man’s voice.  He wasn’t sure if he should try and comfort him or start running.

“I just wanted this to be… I just wanted to go someplace and see some things,” whispered Godai into his hands.  “I wanted there to be a place where I hadn’t…”

Godai trailed off and Akashi felt his heartbeat picking up speed because a man with an impossibly dangerous Precious in his stomach having a panic attack was not the thing he needed when there were child-snatching cultists on the outskirts of town.  He wasn’t sure _what_ he needed but it absolutely involved calling in the rest of the team.

“Okay, don’t… don’t worry about evacuating, alright?” Akashi said as he pulled his screaming Accellular from its pouch and thumbed the Hazard Detector off and began entering the emergency code.  “You take a deep breath.  I’ll—“

Godai let out a sigh and the terrible heat-pressure seemed to disappear from the room.  “I’m alright,” he mumbled, pushing himself to his feet.  “I just wasn’t ready for this.”

“It’s alright,” Akashi replied with a smile, “You just—“

“Where are they coming from?” interrupted Godai, his expression taut.

“If they’re coming, they’re on their way from the south.  There’s a private drive in the hills there.  I think that’s where they’re coming from, so see if you can get people to head toward the north end of town.”  Akashi nodded a bit as his Accellular displayed a message that the emergency signal had been accepted.  They used to have Mr. Voice call up to assess what was going on; if he’d been one of the new field agents, he might still have done.  But while Akashi might not be the leader of the Boukengers any longer, he was still someone whose sense of scale was implicitly trusted.

Which was good because he had a feeling that every second counted.

Godai nodded a bit and looked past Akashi to the window at the far end of the room.  “Mr. Akashi, I’m going to have to ask you to trust me.”

The statement was, to say the least, unexpected.

“I trust you, Godai, so…”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Akashi, but I need _you_ to listen to _me_.”  Akashi could almost feel the other man trying to maintain some composure, could almost hear the thing inside him rolling itself to life, building like some horrible parody of a turbine inside of Godai, “I’m going to switch jobs with you.  You get everyone to safety.  I’ll hold them off.”

The matter-of-fact delivery of the phrase almost made Akashi laugh.  Had it been described to him, it would have been ludicrous: some skinny hippie with a too-big smile looking at him and volunteering to hold off some evil he’d never seen.  But it wasn’t funny now and something in Godai’s eyes—and probably something in the feeling of heat and pressure emanating from the man’s stomach—told him that it probably _was_ the best course of action.  At least until the rest of the team arrived.

“Alright,” he said, meeting the man’s gaze, “I’ll get everyone heading northward, you do… whatever it is you’re gonna do.  Just get out of there if it’s too much, okay?  My team’s on the way.”

Godai looked a little relieved at this and nodded once, pushing himself to his feet.  “Good.  Just…” the man trailed off before he smiled weakly at Akashi, “Just be careful when you come get me, alright?”

Akashi didn’t like the sound of that.

There was a sound like a thousand trains slamming into each other at 300kph from outside.  He didn’t like the sound of _that_ , either.  The latter cancelled out the former.  There was no time to plan ahead.  He was almost out of the frying pan and if there was fire, he’d deal with that next.

“Good luck,” he said to Godai.

There was something almost comic in the grim expression on Godai’s face as he gave Akashi a thumbs-up.  “You, too,” Godai replied.


	13. Godai

 

_Godai hated lying._

_But he was always doing it._

_He hated pretending he was happy but there were only a handful of people on the planet who understood—really understood—what had happened to him, what it had meant for him, how he had not quite come back from it._

_He and Ichijou never talked about the day on the mountain.  Never talked about the tense look they shared when he felt Daguva’s Amadam break or the sense of calm that filled Godai near unto bursting as the sound of the third bullet from Ichijou’s gun echoed in the white noise stillness of the snow-covered mountain.  They never spoke about the matter-of-fact, almost mechanical way Ichijou had trained the gun on Godai’s stomach, on the Amadam, and studied Godai’s face as he came back to himself._

_They never talked about it because they both knew the answers to all the questions either of them could ask.  They were never even difficult answers, all of them simple binaries.  Yes or no._

_It put them on the same page.  It was why they were able to stay together.  It’s why, in their way, they were happy together even though they spent most of their time apart.  It did inform the fact that he and Ichijou would be up far too late into the evening before Godai went anywhere and Godai always knew it was Ichijou checking up on him.  Was he going to adventure or was he going away or was it all just too much?_

_Those questions were harder._

_But in the fight between heartbreak and leaving the world in ashes, the question became simple again._

_They loved each other even though their entire relationship was built around the question Ichijou never asked on that mountain and the answer Godai never gave._


	14. Chapter 07

 

When Godai looked at the creatures—no, the people, people transformed by the “evil” Mr. Akashi described—walking into town on the backroads highway the bus had taken into this new town, he felt he understood what it must have been like for Ichijo waiting to see if there was any Godai left or if the Amadam had made him something else.  The people were all in pain, either transformed into cruel parodies of natural life or partway into such a transformation.  He didn’t need any extrasensory powers to know that they were in pain but they were pushing on in spite of it.  He didn’t know what was going on but it was almost admirable in a heartbreaking sort of way that they were managing to put one unfamiliar foot in front of the other.  Leading them, he saw a hooded man and he could smell the unreality coming off him, feel the pull of him.  It was like a black hole, the gravity of which was pulling the whole world into him as his grinding metal voice made Godai’s molar’s ache.

It was like the Amadam, grabbing him by the soul and dragging him down, down, down.

He held out his palm to the group, a little more than a dozen of the transformed and transforming people and their hooded leader, in what he hoped was a universal signal for them to stop.  To his surprise, they did.

Godai tilted his head a bit at them and coughed once before venturing, “I don’t know what you’re planning but please.  Put it on hold until we can evacuate the city.  If you start something now, someone might get hurt.  I don’t want that.”

There were sounds among the group.  He couldn’t tell if it was just some of the transformed people trying to catch breath in their strange new lungs or if they were laughing.  A gesture from the hooded man silenced them.

“Who are you?” came the grating metal of the hooded man’s voice.  Godai could see the hungry reflection of his eyes under the hood.  He might not have known that exact look but he at least knew one of its relatives.  He’d seen it in Daguva’s eyes the first time they met, on the day of fire.

Godai took a breath to steady himself, “I’m Godai Yuusuke,” he said as calmly as he could, reaching into his pocket to produce a business card out of habit.  It was probably a foolish gesture but on the other hand…

“No,” it said and he felt the grating metal reaching into his head, its icy touch working its way down his nervous system to the Amadam.  Its voice rang all through him, **Who are you.**

In through the nose, out through the mouth.  Count down from ten.  Anger management 101.  Steps he put himself through like clockwork, things he barely even thought about any more.  Which was a problem, of course, because the point of them was that you needed to change your thinking.  Godai licked his lips before speaking, “I’m someone who doesn’t want to fight you,” he said carefully, wishing the Amadam would slow its spinning, wishing the feeling of the voice and whatever it belonged to would just leave him alone, “But to protect these people, I will.  Please don’t make me.”

“Protect them?” said the hooded man, using his lips this time, “Who do you think these people are?” The hooded man gestured to the transformed people who all of them nodded, a couple of whom stepped forward, moving to stand closer to the hooded man as if to protect him.  “This is the home of the new world, Godai Yuusuke,” said the hooded man.  He was about to go on when the other voice, the metal-on-metal voice, the voice which needed no lips silenced the hooded man and his followers.

 **A king stone!** It said, the words filled with a significance that felt as heavy as steel even as the associations connected to it escaped him.  He could guess what it was referring to, but.

 **Tear him apart!** The lipless voice, the thing behind or inside the hooded man felt suddenly ravenous and Godai could feel it ballooning itself out into the air.  **He will be the final sacrament.  The power which will secure your place alongside your children, which will justify your pain.**

There was a twist in the air and Godai felt the Amadam humming inside him in a way it hadn’t in years.  Something was inside the hooded man.  Something that was not an Amadam but which was at least a relative of it and the eyes of the hooded man met Godai’s and he could see that they had turned green and segmented.

But they were no less empty.

The group was cautiously making its way toward him.  They were all of them new to their bodies and most of them seemed unused to moving in them at all, let alone _fighting_ in them.  He gestured at them to stop.  Pleaded with them.  But they did not hear him.

“Damn it all,” muttered Godai under his breath before he stuck an arm straight out in front of him, feeling the Arcle emerge from his stomach, pushing the transformation belt into being around his waist.  He felt the belt throbbing like a wound as it prepared to release its white-hot energies in a firestorm of transformation.

Godai wondered, in the split-second before he transformed, if this was truly the only way or if having a hammer this effective just made everything look like a nail.

“Transform,” he whispered.

And the world was awash with flame as Kuuga, vantablack and cold as deep space with wisps of flame licking up from every joint took Godai’s place in the world, impossible senses taking in the scent of corruption from the transformed people and letting him see—for the first time truly _see_ —the massive silver-black presence which drove the hooded man.

Godai wrapped his will around Kuuga to dull its violent power, to hold it in place as the transformed people descended on him.  He could hear the silver-black thing behind the hooded man howling with something like laughter.

 **Black Sun!** it howled, **Black Sun, soon I will become!**

Godai had agreed to hold the line and the thing that looked into him was trying to find a weakness, trying to find a way inside of him but Godai knew—and, he hoped, the thing knew also—that there was no victory to be had here by either of them.  It continued gibbering about wholeness and a “king stone” as it tried to worm its way into his soul.  It kept calling him “Black Sun” and demanded satisfaction for long-past crimes.  It kept talking and forcing its victims to throw themselves at him.

He couldn’t stop them and he didn’t know, yet, how to stop the thing which was driving the hooded man the way Godai drove Kuuga without killing an innocent.

The transformed people, they seemed hardy enough that the burns they suffered from touching Kuuga’s burning black chitin did not incinerate them as it might have done.  They could not harm him and he did not want to harm them.

Godai had no idea how long the stalemate would last but at least as long as there was a stalemate, Akashi would have a chance to get the people out of town.

But the stalemate would have to break.

And unless he or Akashi could figure something out before then, it was going to leave this town looking like the women it had consumed those centuries ago.


	15. Akashi

_Back in 2000_ , _you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing about Number Four._

_It was hard not to.  A bunch of new monsters infiltrating the city in a way that hadn’t been seen in ages, popping up not to laugh, not to conquer, not to try and convert people, not even to try and steal things.  They just appeared and murdered everyone they could get their hands on._

_Akashi remembered it being in the news all over the world while he and his father drifted around on what his dad had called Akashi’s “internship”.  He’d hated the way his old man was constantly condescending to him, but it was hard to deny that it had worked.  He’d found some of the finest artifacts from Muu currently in circulation that year, and gone back to take most of them_ out _of circulation years later as a part of SGS._

 _But he remembered nothing about that year so much as watching news footage of the day Number Zero finally emerged, the Day of Flame.  They were in South Africa, celebrating the discovery of a cache of Khoikhoi artifacts and about to meet one of his father’s treasure-hunting friends (dad never actually_ said _he was a fence but even then, Akashi knew the score) when his dad shook him awake in the middle of the night._

_The two of them watched in mute terror as a brave reporter narrated what was happening, “Breaking News” scrolling across the screen in English and three more languages he didn’t speak._

_Everything was on fire.  Number Four was on the ground as Number Zero laughed and laughed and cars were rolling by driven by flaming skeletons, more skeletons lay on the ground all around them and he heard something almost like a word—Daguva—howled by Zero before the camera fell to the ground and everything was drowned out by screams._

_The rest of the evening was a blur of trying to get a line back to Japan.  They didn’t have many people they knew back there—Akashi rarely stayed anywhere long enough to make any real friends—but they had neighbors and his father wanted to make sure they were all right or if they hadn’t heard, tell them to get the fuck back inside and stay there._

_The next day, he and his father had their biggest fight to date.  His father kept screaming about the art of the hunt, about the thrill of the find, about finding one’s self through seeking treasures._

_But Akashi’d made up his mind: he was going to help.  Somehow or another, he was going to help._


	16. Chapter 08

 

Bouken Red was not finding helping as easy as he’d thought it would be.

Akashi was holding the blade of his javelin out at the shopkeeper, his back to the scared tourists who huddled against the wall of the bus depot.

By the time he’d got out of the hotel, he’d found most of it empty.  Most of everywhere was empty.  When he found a big group of people, he was hoping that, somehow, they’d all already got the memo, that he’d find out everything was already evacuated, that some miracle had happened and Eiji’d arrived sooner than expected to help Akashi sweep everything up then drinks all around.

Of course, that wasn’t what had happened.

He’d found a frighteningly large group of people advancing on the tour group who’d been herded into a corner.

And a lot of the herders were carrying weapons.

His shout of “Start up!” had got their attention, though, and when he landed between the mob and the tourists, he seemed to have become some kind of stalemate because they weren’t advancing anymore.  They weren’t leaving, either, but it seemed the kind of day where you took what you could get.

“Let’s all calm down,” he said in his best German, being as polite as you could be while slowly waving a weapon on a few dozen people who seemed happy to tear some perfectly nice (if often annoying) tourists apart.  “What seems to be the problem?”

The shopkeeper, the middle-aged woman with the overpriced water and the dusty “spellbooks”, looked both unimpressed by Akashi’s Boukenger suit and apologetic for the words leaving her lips, “The Prophet spoke to us, see,” she said by way of explanation, “And I’m sorry, but he said that it’s the end of the world soon, so we’re going to add you to the fire.”

“Prophet?” repeated Akashi, incredulous, though it did make a kind of sense; isolated town, in need of…

Wait, no, it really didn’t make any sense.  The town wasn’t even that isolated.

“The world’s falling apart,” said an elderly man he recognized as a bartender.

“We’re all losing everything,” said a middle-aged woman he’d seen waiting tables.

“We wasted… we wasted everything!” said an old man who was holding an old hunting rifle that looked as old as he was.  He looked as if he were weeping.  And also as if he were perfectly capable of pulling the trigger.

“There was nothing left for our children,” said an old woman whose face was streaked with red, “but he promised us a new world for them, one after this one.  One where they would be happy.”

“Children?” repeated Akashi before it hit him:  He hadn’t seen anyone under the age of thirty since he’d come to town.  It wasn’t something he thought about, really.  He didn’t really interact with children very much.  Even the tours of SGS’ public facilities, when any of the team was involved in them, usually involved him smiling before finding an excuse to duck out.  He’d heard that Mogami and Mamiya were naturals at it but…

How could he have been so _stupid_?

“Look, whatever it is you’re being promised, it’s a lie.  Nobody can deliver a happy future.  That’s something we _all_ have to make.  Together!”

“You don’t know what it’s like!” shouted someone from the back to murmurs of agreement, “This town is our home and the cities keep sucking us dry!” 

“The city’s dying and our kids are starving and we have to do something!”

“The government won’t help!  They say it’s good for competition!”

“We can’t offer them enough money to stay!”

“But there’s no jobs there, either!  We had to _do something_!”

“And when the Prophet came and told us about Golgom and the world that’s coming, we—“

“I don’t care!” spat Akashi, brandishing his javelin, “I don’t care why you’re doing this, I don’t care what you _think_ some mystic is going to do for you!  I won’t let you hurt anyone!”

The pleading voices trailed off.  They weren’t trying to make him understand, after all.  It was how they explained what happened to themselves.  Put everything in stark terms then act accordingly.  The Lemurians did it, Gordom (was Golgom related?  If he made it out of this, he’d have to look it up) did it.  Even Mr. Voice had done it once or twice.  It made sense when Mr. Voice said it, of course, but it was all in how you put it.  Someone made them afraid for their children.

Of _course_ they were willing to put some strangers against the wall.

He was about to try and reason with them when there was a sound like screaming metal that was almost—not quite but almost—words.  The townspeople clutched at their ears before they all turn around and ran away without their prizes.

Akashi turned to their guide, “Can you get them out of here?”

She nodded, eyes wide.

“Good.  I’m gonna go see what that was.”

She nodded again and took a breath before barking something in English at the tourists, seeming to snap them out of their stunned reverie. 

He could only imagine what it must have been like for them just now, some guy in shiny tights shouting German at a bunch of people who had suddenly turned predatory.  But there was no time.  He shot his grappling hook onto a building and let it pull him into the air as he went to go check on Godai, to make sure the Amadam hadn’t fallen into the hands of… of “Golgom”, whatever that was.

And, not a little, to see how on Earth the quiet, panicky hippie was going to hold off a small platoon of monsters.


	17. Kuuga

 

_In Kuuga’s eyes, the world was far, far simpler.  Kuuga could see a fly from kilometers away, pick the sound of its wings out of all the noise in the world and smell whatever it was the fly was buzzing around.  Kuuga took in all the world and filled Godai’s senses with it and left it either to the Amadam’s hunger for violence or the part of Godai’s brain that was capable of initiating violent action to decide what to do with that data._

_Because Kuuga, like Daguva, like all the rest of the Grongi, was made to fight._

_Godai wasn’t.  He wasn’t sure what that meant for how things had gone as Kuuga, he wasn’t sure if Kuuga was more or less a threat to the world because he fought it every step of the way, because he feared what it might be capable of if he ever lost control of it._

_With all the information that flooded into Godai, what he knew was this:_

_These transformed people were in pain but pushing themselves to the defense of the thing inside the hooded man.  They were relentless in bringing their transformed limbs to bear on Kuuga’s impossibly hard armor, apparently not noticing how just touching him set their hands ablaze.  Blasts of energy were absorbed into the inky darkness of the armor and the weaponized excretions evaporated on the flames as the thing with the grinding metal voice gibbered and sang to itself behind them._

**The new flesh!** _it sang, its green gaze trying to bore itself into Godai’s mind,_ **The new flesh of the Black Sun!  The second coming of the Shadow Moon!  The age of Golgom begins!**

_Godai would have worried about it more were he not concerned with trying to snatch back Kuuga’s fists before they could do real damage to the transformed people.  They weren’t monsters—so few of the things Kuuga fought really were—they were just scared of… of something.  Scared of something that wasn’t the hooded man.  They’d clearly pinned something massive on him._

_They needed something.  Needed it like air.  And violence was the only thing they could think to use to get it._

_Godai understood that._

_Frighteningly, Kuuga did, too._


	18. Chapter 09

 

Akashi was good at making connections.  It’s what you had to do in his line of work.  You got a feeling for how things fit together and damned if things weren’t falling into place for him.  The economy had gone to pot all over the world and now a bunch of people were convinced it wasn’t going to get better so they bargained with this “Golgom” in the hopes of… what?  Well, apparently in the hopes that being a monster would be better.  Typical nihilist death-cult nonsense.  Things looked a bit rough so you just tossed it all in because burning everything to the ground meant you could build again and nothing to do with being able to avoid being held to account by the rest of the world.

He knew he should have sympathy.  If they were just sad or looking for help, he might have done.  What did you do when your world was falling apart all around you?

Apparently some people thought “give our children to an evil cult” was a solution worth looking into.

It was probably better than going the family annihilator route.  But only just.

They didn’t have an SGS on-hand.  He didn’t see any sign of any Super Sentai activity here.  Maybe it was just too much for them.

Whatever it was that had driven them to this, though, they were attacking Godai and the thought of a city of self-mutilating zealots with something that made his hazard detector feel as if it was going to explode sent a shiver down his spine.  They were doing this well with just a monstrous corpse flower.  Who could imagine what they might do with an Amadam.

Turns out he needn’t have worried.

His grappling hook pulled him onto the top of a building from which he could see the street where Godai’d said he would hold the creatures off and the things were, indeed, being held off but not by Godai.

It was Number Four.  Or maybe it wasn’t?  It looked like Number Four, all black and gold with those same big red eyes but it was also different.  A foot or two taller than Godai with armor that looked like the black hole he’d passed once, only with stylized flame patterns on the forehead and shoulders.  Each of the mutants who struck Number Four caught fire for a moment.

It was a horror to behold.  A flaming, red-eyed void in the shape of a man.

One thing struck Akashi once he’d sorted away the idea that the kindly hippie who’d just had something like a panic attack in Akashi’s hotel room was also the monster-slayer from his youth: he wasn’t moving.  The monsters were attacking him with whatever bizarre faculties they’d been given, unholy strength or flaming breath or acid secretions or blasts of pus-colored light and still, Number Four—Godai—wasn’t even moving to block them.  There was something in the horrid surety of this jet-black creature’s presence that gave Akashi the feeling that when Number Four moved, nobody would be happy that it had done so.

Of course, the same went for the hooded man.  Amidst the chaos of the bodies throwing themselves at Number Four, the hooded man was also stock-still though Akashi could feel its metal-on-metal voice in his back teeth as it shouted or droned at its underlings.

The hooded man and the monsters were focusing on Number Four, apparently forgetting the Firey Adventurer altogether.

Which was good because if the lot of them were here in town throwing themselves into the fire that was Number Four, they weren’t at the flower.

Akashi keyed the call command to his GoGo dump truck and launched his grappling hook toward the treeline.  The cult had been holding children and damned if he was going to let them finish whatever it was they thought they were doing.


	19. Interlude - The Hooded Man

 

_The hooded man had been lost when the voice found him._

_It was hard to remember much but he remembered its voice droning at him from miles away, calling him into a sealed elevator shaft in a half-demolished building.  He remembered the feel of the acid-scored stone under his fingertips like glass, remembered the voice compelling him to move piles and piles of rubble over the course of months, slowly losing himself to the drone._

_He couldn’t remember if he’d had a family before.  He was sure he must have but the voice did not let him keep things from before.  But it was generous, oh yes.  When his hands were scraped raw and his muscles aching, the voice made him whole and strong again.  When his lips failed him because his mind was filled with the voice, it gave him eloquence and the power to motivate people to see as he did._

_In his dreams, he was surrounded by others, all clad in white robes in the warm, fetid dark under the world where his precious children waited for their time to rise up, for a world which had made itself right for their coming, a world with oceans of sludge where the snake ate the sun and the air was thick with brimstone and the great green eyes of the Creation King watched over them all and kept them safe._

_He had been lost in the haze of dream when he finally broke through and found the rickety old elevator shaft._

**GO** _, the voice had commanded him.  And he did.  And as the voice always did, he was repaired over the course of who knew how long (there was no light down there) and made suitable for the voice’s purposes once more._

**I have waited** _, it told him,_ **here in the dark.  My body destroyed by the black sun but the world has not forgotten me.  My body has forgotten me but the king stone survives.  One is not enough to make a god**

**But it is enough to make a start.**

_He had nodded his agreement because the voice had not left his mind clear enough for anything else.  He had wandered into a world which was not so dark now that the voice had given him eyes with which to see and found the great temple with its stairway snaking down, down, down into the ground where the voice had compelled him to bow before an empty throne._

_There was rubble everywhere and a couple skeletons which had once belonged to humans._

_The voice gave him a mission._

_And he had gone out into the world._


	20. Chapter 10

 

There was a skill to being Kuuga.  At first, it had been relatively easy, learning how to move as the Titan, the Dragon, the Pegasus on top of the Mighty form, learning how to shift the speed and rhythm of the Amadam’s movements to create newer shapes and feeling the quiet joy of inhabiting a body that was so incredibly strong.

But over the years, those nuances had faded away.  The Amadam was hungry.  Its hunger was tempered by the belt—the Arcle—that contained it but it was no less hungry and like some jealous child, it seemed to pout at how little he let it off its leash, seemed to scream at him to be allowed its violent release. 

Godai was often tempted.  There was an electric thrill to moving as The Ultimate Darkness which did not exist anywhere else on Earth.  He’d gone out hiking around volcanoes, not knowing if his next step would be the one where cooled lava would give way to the white-hot magma which would devour him; not even that adrenaline high could match the feeling of having chaos by the horn when he steered the Ultimate Darkness’ impossible strength.  Every motion, every impulse, every twitch of muscle threatened to send Kuuga’s body hurtling into whatever was around it to erase whatever it should touch.

This made the effort of holding Kuuga still almost painful.  The Amadam was spinning as if it meant to punish him for stopping.  He should be fighting them, he should be _crushing_ them.  Their violence was a threat to him that needed to be met with an overwhelming force to ensure that none of those monsters could even think to raise a hand to him again.

The Amadam, Kuuga, wanted him to crush them.

And it would be so easy to do it.  Through Kuuga’s senses, Godai felt how comparatively fragile they were, half-grown and frail, lacking an Amadam of their own or anything but some pale, foul hedge magic.  He could feel a part of him—a part of him that was proud of his capacity for violence, of his imperviousness, of his power—feeling contempt for the creatures which had begun to resort to crude, improvised weapons.  Godai recoiled from the idea.

It wasn’t his.  That idea did not come from him.  Couldn’t.

This time, Godai was right. 

The green gaze of the silver-black _thing_ was probing at his mind, trying to echo itself inside of him as it must have done in the man in the hood, supplanting his voice with its own.

**There is no antidote for poison of the soul, Black Sun,** it said in his heart as the tendrils of its will slid along his eleven chakras like probing fingers.  **You stole from me my body and my destiny but when your King Stone is mine, you will be dead and the Shadow Moon will rise as the new Creation King.**

He didn’t know how to say he didn’t know what the voice was talking about but the scent of hot metal filled his nostrils as he felt the thing trying to pry his will from Kuuga, to unleash it.  **Your death comes when you relent, Black Sun.  This flesh will destroy this city and that sight will destroy your soul.**

It was right, of course.  There was a sun-eating snake inside his heart and he was too busy holding the door to the Arcle closed to fight it.

There was another— **No!** —option, he realized.

The Amadam was not alone in him.  The Amadam was the power source, the driving power of violence but it was not all of what made **Silence!  This flesh is** Kuuga.

Inside himself, Godai held his limbs steady against Kuuga’s instinctive desire to evaporate his attackers with the force of its burning violence and wrapped his heart around the hot metal snake with the sun in its mouth as it filled his mind with its echoing metal vastness.

**The memory of the king stone will not make you a god, Black Sun!  My will is too powerful for mere flesh!  I will not be contained!**

The Arcle was built to contain the Amadam, the belt acting as a mediator between its ever-evolving violent potential and its host, stratifying its gifts until the one possessing it could master themselves and the Amadam.  It was built **You have no hope!** to contain violence.

Inside himself, Godai dragged the grinding metal voice into the prison the ancient Linto had built for the Amadam.

Inside himself, Godai pushed the green-eyed presence into the same cell as an elemental force of violence.

Outside of him, with the monsters looking on, the hooded man fell to the ground, much to the surprise of his adherents.


	21. Monsters

 

_There was a respite from the pain of growing when the hooded man left the three of them to guard the bud.  They had all won or lost in the rites the hooded man had given them, though as he had said, there was not truly much difference.  The point was not to win.  The point was not glory or victory or self-confidence.  Quite the contrary, the point was to destroy the self, the ultimate sacrifice._

_They had all of them ruined any family or friendships they had, any valued part of life had been sacrificed and the sacrifice of something so important was what fueled the plant, let it give life to the children who slumbered inside it to become the new nobility in the world that was coming, the world of poisoned skies where culture had devoured itself and their hometown was not even a curiosity for tourists, but a concrete husk with water-stained witches with peeling paint decorating the decaying facades, showing the moldy concrete beneath._

_The three of them were united in the ecstacy of self-death and rebirth as the honored mutants of Golgom, united by the horrors they had seen and committed and more than anything, united by their protective love of the future which had been entrusted to them by the hooded man.  One of the three, remade into an elk-man leaned against the massive corpse-flower bud, listening to the low mechanical rumble of its gestation pods, to the sound of the children—were they hers?—being transformed, a process which could take years and she would love them so well as they grew._

_Another, a hawk who held her beak shut against the pain of her force-grown wings failing to work and the talons which itched unceasingly at the end of her fingers and toes.  She wondered if she had always dreamed of flight but knew now it was to be a dream denied.  It was not so large a thing, though.  She also had the future in mind.  For the first time, she thought of nothing else.  And that single-mindedness gave her the wherewithal to take her shift as watch seriously. Force-grown eyes swiveled in their recently-transformed skull as she tried to get used to using eyes so much sharper than she remembered her own being._

_The third tried and failed to sleep behind a tree, trying to ignore the constant, screaming pain in his spine.  He could not remember if he was a man become a cat or a housecat forcibly-grown into a man.  Sometimes he thought he should check his sex organs; if he were a cat, he would be neutered, right?  But, then, the magic which had transformed him had neutered him, anyway.  Golgom had no use for mutants who could reproduce; not out of elder stock, at least; they were the ones who had damned the world and this was the cost.  It was a small price to pay, knowing that the children would be the rules of the next world._

_The cry of the hawk—a sound as forced and painful as the process which had birthed her—caught the attention of the other two, the elk pushing herself to her still-unsteady hooved feet and the cat digging his claws into a nearby tree to help him get back on two legs with a low groan._

_The hawk described the same warrior the others had fought earlier, the one the hooded man had sent away.  They shared a look which conveyed a moment of worry for their fellows but in which they asserted that they all remembered their purpose._

_They were here for the children.  For the future._

_And as the man in red and white hit the ground and snapped his fingers, they all knew what they had to do._


	22. Chapter 11

 

They were on Akashi before he could even try talking to them.  He realized it was probably a bad idea to come in the Boukenger suit but on the other hand, he had no idea how long the process of… of whatever it was that they were doing to those kids was gonna take or, more importantly, if it was reversible.

And not just for the kids.  Whatever these things were now, they used to be people and, from the sound, people who didn’t quite appreciate what they were doing.  People who still had to pay for it, who should still have their kids taken away, people who needed a half-decent education in macroeconomics or maybe someone to help them move if their town was dying but…

He blocked the cat’s clawed hand with the shaft of his javelin and slipped around the cat to kick the elk in the knee, sending it stumbling to the ground.

Akashi was almost sad to have noticed a pattern in this crop of monsters.  It wasn’t like Gordom or any of the other Negative Syndicates, where the monsters were means to an end or part of some ancient race which was malign but at least felt natural.  These things were barely finished, little more than half-sculpted clay destined for a kiln and for all the hawk-monster’s throwing dagger feathers hurt, without their hooded master, they were just about as dangerous as wet clay.

Especially once he heard the sound of Mogami’s GoGo Gyro.

There was a blur of blue and silver that he caught out the corners of his eyes as Souta and Eiji caught the hawk and the elk.

“Don’t hurt them,” barked Akashi as Masumi and Natsuki grabbed each of the cat’s arms as if from nowhere.

“Call us from halfway ‘round the world and now you won’t let us do our job?” grunted Eiji with a grin, “What’s going on?”

“A _massively_ powerful Precious, that’s what,” came Sakura’s voice from behind Akashi.  Naturally, she was already at the site of the corpse-flower, not even bothering with the Boukenger suit and holding her Accelular’s Hazard Detector toward the flower.  “A few of them, in fact.”  She looked back over her shoulder at Akashi, “What have you been doing?”

Akashi could only shrug, “You know, the usu—“

He was cut off when the cat-monster let out a yowl and slipped out of Masumi and Natsuki’s grip (which was impressive as Natsuki’s grip put most commercially-available vices to shame), shoving Akashi and Sakura out of the way to stand, as menacingly as it could, in front of the flower, letting out hissing sounds as it arched its spine in a way that looked painful on a human frame, the matted fur all over its body standing on end.

And it started making noises.

It took Akashi a moment before he realized that he didn’t recognize it as speech because the monster’s vocal cords had been mutated along with the rest of its body.  Besides which, Akashi’s German wasn’t exactly perfect; he’d been so happy for Godai in that respect.

Conversational in German while also being Number Four.  What a weird guy.

“Won’t let you take them!” the cat-monster hissed in German, “I won’t let you they’re all we have!”

He caught Sakura’s look and understood.  They’d turned their children into things and those things… those things were so precious to these people.

It would’ve broken his heart if so many people hadn’t been hurt.

He nodded a little and Sakura leapt onto the cat’s back, sending it sprawling to the ground as Natsumi joined her in the pile atop it, grunting a little as she tried to find a better angle to grab the monster from.

“Just don’t hurt them, okay?” Akashi said as he stepped over the screaming cat-monster, kneeling beside one of the pods and trying to figure out how to deactivate it without hurting the serene-looking glowing child inside, “These aren’t monsters, they’re just… poor, deluded people.”

The hawk, elk, and cat monsters were making sounds now, sounds irregular and nasal, like coughing or laughing or… he looked back over at them as they struggled to get out from under the other Boukengers and saw the fresh tears running out from their malformed eyes.

Masumi’s Boukenger suit disappeared and he gave Akashi a look, “I’m gonna call ahead to Mr. Voice.  This mess is way above any of our pay grades.”

“That reminds me” joked Souta as he struggled to keep the hawk-monster’s vestigial wings from batting him away, “Masumi, I’ve been thinking it’s time I got a raise.”

Under his helmet, Akashi smiled a little, glad for some familiar company for this nonsense.  He found himself watching the watery eyes of the monsters.  He knew how he must look to them; like the fulfillment of the hooded man’s prophecy, like the angel of death, like the Devil himself come to steal their hope away by taking their Precious children away from the dead future of Golgom and forcing them out into the world the previous generation—including, Akashi realized with a grimace, himself—had made.

Akashi understood their urge to fight.  Why they’d done it.

But they’d also turned their children into things and given them to a cult so his sympathies were limited.

In the pod nearest to Akashi, the sleeping child inside turned over in its sleep and slipped its thumb into its mouth, not seeming to notice or care that its veins were glowing green.

Until there was a feeling like a shockwave coming from back up north, like some fundamental principle of the world snapping in two, at which point, the child and the others in the pods connected to the massive corpse flower, woke and began to wail.


	23. Shadow Moon

 

_It wasn’t a King Stone, realized the presence which had once been Shadow Moon._

_It was like a King Stone.  A relative, perhaps.  It empowered by spinning and held within itself a massive potential for power._

_But where the King Stone bonded to the soul, enriched and empowered what was there, made a soul near-immortal even after being separated from its flesh, this had no spirit; at least no spirit that enriched._

_The thing which had once been Shadow Moon felt itself pressed against the stone of the cage which contained the stone, felt the stone’s violent heart growing ecstatic at the prospect of grinding Shadow Moon into dust._

_The spirit wanted to laugh, to beg, to explain._

_But in the end, it lay down in front of the tireless engine of violence and let itself be torn apart._

_This was not Black Sun.  But one day the Black Sun would rise and the Shadow Moon would devour it and become._

_Until then, there was only pain again.  Pain and the long wait for rebirth._


	24. Chapter 12

 

The world seemed to tilt for a moment and the transformed people took involuntary steps back or crumpled to the pavement, screaming.

Godai felt when the Amadam had finished grinding down the presence, felt Kuuga’s satisfaction at having defeated something so totally—not killed, no, merely defeated and Godai was oddly thankful for that.  Killing something, even an evil idea, grated on him.

He knew he’d do it if he couldn’t find another way.  He’d done it before.  That was the part that hurt.

The only thing that kept him sane was the Amadam’s frustration that it could not find a way to properly kill the thing, merely to express its violence at it until it stopped moving.

The transformed people seemed to be getting to their feet and barking at one another to go back, presumably to wherever it was Akashi had found their treasure.

“What happened?”

“It’s not important!  Go!  Go!”

They were shouting as they began scrambling over one another, pushing past each other in a mad scramble to get back out of town, presumably to wherever it was that Mr. Akashi’d come from that’d left him so dazed.  They left the hooded man, now just a man staring dumbly out at the world and breathing as if he were sleeping, laying in a heap in the middle of the street, like a broken marionette.  Godai wanted to reach out, to pick him up, to place him on at least one of the benches in the town square but the moment he had the thought, he felt the Amadam turning again, eager to drink its fill of carnage.  He could almost feel the man’s clothes catching fire and his skin blackening, splitting, and disintegrating under Kuuga’s white-hot hands.

So Godai, with a grimace, left him there and took careful control over Kuuga’s legs and began running after the pack of the transformed, either to stop them or warn Akashi that they were coming.

He imagined it was like wrangling a bull.  You could be skilled at it, have years of practice, but you had to know that if you slipped, that was the end of everything.

As Kuuga began to move, Godai hoped to his core that he wouldn’t slip.


	25. Children

 

_The children which were not children had dreamt so well for so long that it had forgotten the light and the stabbing pain of wakefulness.  It remembered that pain, on some level.  A pain not of body but of spirit, the pain of the warm, metal-and-oil comfort of their transformative sleep being ripped away and replaced with consciousness and memory.  In their dreams, the hooded man promised to remove those, to create a world of comfort and ease for the no-longer-children._

_The hooded man had lied._

_When they awoke, it was not to joy and everlasting glory, it was not to a body which emerged, perfect and glorious, from the chrysalis of a hundred years to a world whose very air had been engineered to suit them._

_No, instead it was to six unknown faces pulling them, one after another, into a massive white vehicle upon which they could see flashing red lights.  A couple of them were speaking in a language the not-quite-children knew, sometimes meeting their gaze with expressions of profound concern before switching to German to ask if they were okay._

_They weren’t.  Not a one of them were.  Their world was comfortable, benign silence and then it was not._

_Just as they were the rulers of the coming world and then they were not._

_Their bodies behaved erratically and three of their guardians (the elk, the cat, the hawk) were restrained alongside them.  Their silver captor muttered words they didn’t understand, running strange instruments over them, murmuring in the language the children did not understand.  They could not fight, could not impose their wills as the dream had promised them they could do._

_They calmed, though, when they smelled their subjects moving closer._

_The calm was not unnoticed by their captors._


	26. Chapter 13

Akashi, atop his dump truck, looked out at the advancing monsters, all of them scrambling over one another to make it back here.  The others had set their vehicles in a wall around the site of the cultist’s unblooming corpse flower, preparing to isolate it just as soon as Natsuki finished mapping out how far out the thing’s roots had gone and Sakura found out just how far down the chambers of sleeping children went.

They didn’t want to risk unhooking any of them improperly and besides, plant Precious were particularly difficult to handle.  If you weren’t careful, you were liable to have a flower growing in your stomach or worse.  The time he and Eiji had raised up a Momotaro was strange enough but at least it ended well.

But these were very different children and this was no peach floating down the river.

“You all keep doing what you’re doing,” Akashi said into his Accellular, “I’ll see if I can’t hold them off.”

“I know you’re a borderline free agent now, but we’re still a team,” replied Masumi, a hint of a smile in his voice.  “And if what’s going on inside the parents is anything like the stuff we’re seeing in the kids, you’re gonna need us.”

Akashi let out a sigh.  “I hate when you have a point.”

“Hey, I _am_ the leader, chief.  It’s a prerequisite.”

“Can you get Eiji to hang back?  I want those kids stabilized and his vehicles are the only ones ready for it.”

Akashi smiled fondly before hopping off the top of the top of the truck, dragging the wheel of his Accelluar down the side of the massive red vehicle to initiate his transformation once more into Bouken Red as the other Boukengers stepped out from behind the wall of vehicles to form a too-small human wall against the small horde of monstrous adults and more than a few of the human ones in their wake.

He wasn’t sure which group he found more repulsive.

The monsters stopped a few meters away from the Boukengers.  The one in front, a massive rhino-beast whose armored hide was riddled with painful-looking boils, pointed its stumpy fingers at the Boukengers and bellowed once like an animal before barking, in German, “Give us back our future!  We won’t—we won’t let you take them away!”

“You forfeited your right to them when you tried to do to them what you did to yourselves,” replied Akashi, “I don’t care what you were promised, we’re taking them somewhere safe.”

“You won’t,” growled a tiger-monster around fangs too large for its mouth.

The Boukengers shifted in place, brandishing their weapons as threateningly as five humans in advanced body armor could against an army of malformed creatures bent on tearing them apart.

They were all of them in pain and more than a few had obvious weaknesses but others were well-made enough that any one of them could possibly pose a threat to the whole team.

The monsters were about to advance when, from behind them, behind the others who had followed after, apparently intent on helping them realize their vision, came a voice which carried with it an undertone of buckling metal.

This time, though, it was much more familiar.

“Stop!” came Godai’s voice, amplified and changed by the monstrous carapace he inhabited.

Akashi could see the crowed opening down the middle as the flaming black hole that was Number Four parted the crowd, the flames subsiding as he came closer to the fore and moving to stand between the two sides which had formed.  The massive black shape moved slowly, with an exaggerated care as if walking on eggshells and hoping not to break a single one.  It turned its red gaze to the massive, hurting leaders of the monsters.

The monsters and Number Four were still for a long time before the black carapace seemed to fall away like a pile of ash, leaving the smaller, far less intimidating figure of Godai to stand in front of the monsters.

The Boukengers turned to Akashi, who gestured for them to let it play out.

“Stop this,”  Godai said in his best German, “I don’t know if there’s a way back from all this, but you’ll never find it if you keep trying to make all this work.”

“They’re our children,” growled the Tiger for what was not the first time, “Our future!”

Godai nodded before gesturing at the monsters, “That future isn’t coming.  You all know that.  Whatever that… that spirit was, it’s not here now.  I don’t know if it’ll ever be ba—“

“Because you killed him,” spat the rhino as its arm shot out and grabbed Godai by the throat, lifting him off the ground.  There were tears in the rhino’s eyes, “You killed him and there’s nobody to save us!”

Akashi was about to tell the Boukengers to attack but Godai’s arm waved them down.  Choked but somehow unafraid.

Well, not exactly “somehow”.  Akashi knew.  Heck, the rest of them probably did, too, by now.  He was Number Four.  Even some of the monsters seemed to have the good sense to be afraid.

“There’s…” Godai shifted his head to get a bit more air, “There’s almost never anyone to save you.  God, I know that so well.  Some days, you… you do your best but everything goes to hell.”  He met the rhino monster’s eyes and after a moment, the rhino let him drop.  If the attack had left any bruising on Godai, it didn’t show.

Godai just placed his hand around the rhino’s, “There’s a future after what’s been done to you.  It’s not going to be easy but look around you.”  He gestured with his other hand to the other monsters, to the people of the town behind them, to the Boukengers themselves.  “All these people want to help you.  You want to help each other.  That’s… that’s the only way any of us can smile, y’know?  If we help each other.”

Maybe it was the man’s words, maybe it was the pained little smile, but the rhino just slumped to its knees, “Can you change me back?” it mumbled and when its voice was that quiet, Akashi could hear the pained movement of its lungs, the wheezing that probably left the monster light-headed. 

Godai turned back to Akashi, “Can you help them, Mr. Akashi?”

Akashi shrugged a little, “I don’t know.  But if we can’t, we’ll find someone who can.”  He was fairly sure some of the contacts he’d made during the last big interdimensional incursion could make some kind of headway.

The other man smiled wider and gave a thumbs-up before turning back to the monsters, “See?  There’s more to life than being whatever that thing made you.  Now come on,” he said, waving his hand toward the line of vehicles, “Let’s check on the kids.”

Akashi moved to stand in front of Godai, “Hold up.  They can’t just go in there!  Those are the people who put those kids in this situation!”

Godai let out a little sigh and shrugged, “If they try and do anything, then we’ll punish them.  But first, can’t you… can’t you just give them this much, Mr. Akashi?”

Something in the man’s face made Akashi look over at the others.  Souta was shrugging, Natsuki nodded eagerly, Sakura shook her head.  He met Masumi’s gaze and tilted his helmet.  Masumi gave a short shrug and gestured toward the Aider where Eiji was watching the kids.

“We’ll take this slow,” Masumi stated, stepping out in front of Akashi and Akashi let himself step back, glad all this mess was on somebody else’s head now.  “One at a time.  Nontransformed people get to go in first.  Everyone else is going to submit to all _kinds_ of tests so we can make sure everything’s okay and get to work helping you out.”

Akashi nodded a bit and set about to aiding Sakura in becoming the human funnels for the sudden influx of human (and inhuman) traffic.  He looked up to ask if Godai wanted to help, but there was no sign of the man.

Somehow, that seemed appropriate.

“Someone call Mr. Voice,” he said with a sigh as he deactivated the Boukenger suit, “We’re gonna need a whole damn pile of support here.”


	27. Ichijou

_In Nagano, in the early morning, the phone rings.  The man who lives in the small, meticulously clean apartment is quietly thankful for the invention of individualized ringtones so he does not have an inkling that he should just shoot the ringing phone._

_He fumbles for the little plastic rectangle, hitting the “talk” button.  He prefers the old style phones over smartphones; he likes there to be an easily-found top and bottom of the phone.  He likes being able to activate it without looking._

_“This is Ichijou,” he says by way of greeting, as if he didn't know who was calling._

_“No, no,” he says calmly, reaching out to the end table where they both know he keeps his old service revolver with the nerve-destroying bullets.  They both know it is a crime for him to possess them but the entire department—possibly even the entire defense apparatus of the country—is more than happy that he has them.  When Godai Yuusuke returned, there were more than a few who were happy that the tools to kill him existed._

_“Not at all.  I’m just sorry your trip got cut short,” it happened fairly often.  They never had to speak out loud the fact that he left early any time he had been made to transform._

_“Yeah, I’ll be there.  You just rest in the meanwhile, okay?” There was silence before he came as close as they ever came to asking the question which had hung, silent, in the air between them since the mountain, “Do you need me to bring anything?”_

_“Alright, then.  Just me and a smile.  You rest up.”_

_“Yeah.  You, too.”_


	28. Epilogue

Godai flipped off the satellite phone and let out a long breath. 

He had almost answered ‘yes’ this time.  The sight of dozens of people transformed out of that much desperation… it hurt.  It hurt to have that inside of him.  Knowing that so many of them were in pain—burnt, so many burns—because of him?  That hurt, too.

There was a sound behind him in the empty tavern as Akashi, half-smiling, moved to stand behind the bar, pulling himself a pint before offering one to Godai.  Godai thought a moment before nodding his assent.

“You okay?” asked Akashi, “You bugged out pretty quick.  We were a bit worried.”

Godai shrugged a little, “Just didn’t have a lot of fun there.  And besides, I’m not… I’m not much good at things besides talking.  And not even that, most days.  I just didn’t want to be in the way.”

Akashi nodded a little as if he could see the sense of it, “Fair enough.”

“Are they going to be alright?” Godai asked before taking a swig.  He wasn’t much of a drinker and it wasn’t as if the Amadam was much for allowing his body to be at anything less than peak physical shape.  It lived to destroy alcohol and any other poison that entered his bloodstream, “I was just… trying to find some sort of good out of it all.”

“They’ll be… well, they’ll be alive, anyway.  Where there’s a future there’s hope.”

Godai nodded a little and let out a long breath of air.  “Good.  They… I don’t even know if they deserve anything but they’ve all been through so much.  It’d be too much if they’d lost it all for good.”

Akashi shrugged a little.  “They’ve got their Precious back.  If they can learn to see their kids as kids again, I think it’ll be alright.  If they can’t, well, we’ll be back.  Or someone will, at least.”

“And the tourists?”

There was a short laugh, “Ironically, they’re doing the most good.  They called the American and British embassies and now there’s some kind of UN aid group coming out to evacuate them and start checking on the kids.  I heard they even got a line on that poor guy who had the… whatever that was inside him.  They’re hoping that with a few years of worthwhile therapy, those people will be back to normal.

“And the town?”

Akashi whistled a little before inclining his head to one side, “Only time will tell, I guess.”

“Hm.”

The pair of them sat in silence for a long time before Godai rested his forehead on the bar, covering his head with his hands, trying to will himself to sleep or cry or anything else.

He felt Akashi’s hand on his shoulder, patting it a couple times before it was gone and Akashi left the bar.

Godai let himself weep.

And all the while he promised himself that next time, next time he would find a place where he could just be Godai Yuusuke, where he wouldn’t have to remember how hard it could be to overcome the monster inside of him.

 

* * *

 

“So what was the story with the Tokyo kid?” asked Sakura around the lantern (fires made the transformed people nervous) at the ersatz Boukenger camp.

“Just some poor, dumb kid who got caught up over his head and is making the best of it.”

Sakura let out a snort and half a smile, “Aren’t we all?”

Akashi wanted to be glib and agree.

But he thought of the man he’d left alone in the bar in the abandoned town and was not entirely sure that was the case.


End file.
